Refollow: How To

Hello, my chickadees!

You want to look relevant in the Twittersphere, right? You want to engage with like-minded people, right? A fast and easy way to accomplish that is to use a follow/unfollow app. Heretofore, I had been using ManageFlitter but they got their wings clipped, and satisfying the Twitter gods will require a rewrite of their software. Meanwhile, I’ve adopted Refollow which, effectively, does the same things I was using ManageFlitter for. Here’s how:

On your laptop or desk top (do not try this on a mobile device—total frustration), go to www.re-follow.com and set up an account. They offer a free trial, but you can use more functions if you choose a paid monthly plan. Write down your password and login information. Then log out.

Which you can’t read here, but this shows where on that screen you’ll look for the plus sign (circled in red, upper right corner) and you/your campaign (circled in blue, left side).

Click on the area at the left (with my picture). That will take you to a page with a lot of information that we will ignore right now. Scroll down to the bottom of that page and click on:

That will produce the following (I left the right side off for readability, and it’s not relevant to what we’re doing now):

Here we are on the Create a Campaign page (red-circled area above). “Campaign” is the word Refollow uses for search; it’s not really a campaign so don’t worry about getting into a big involved deal—it’s easy.

In the green-circled area above, when you click the down arrow, you’ll have the choice to find users who:

Follow

Tweet the phrase

Are followed by

Have those words in their profile

Mentioned me

Are my followers

And in the blue-circled area to its right you refine the search results, getting specific about whom or what you want to target. For example, here are some suggestions:

Tweet the phrase global warming (would find everyone who included those words in a tweet). You can do a search for single words or phrases here.

Are followed by Oprah Winfrey (would target tweeters Oprah deems worthy of her follow).

Have words “social media” in their profile (would target tweeters who want to be recognized for involvement with social media—they have that phrase in their profile, not just in their tweets. You can also search this way for hobbies, religious affiliation, interests, anything).

Mentioned me Cathy Turney (would target people who used my name, so I could thank them for thinking of me; they could also search for me using my handle, @CathyTurneyLafs).

Are my followers (would target people who have chosen to follow me).

The objective of using Refollow to build our follower base is twofold: we want to look “relevant” by having a large following, and when we have a purpose for tweeting, we want to target those most likely to be interested. In this exercise, I want to target people who might be interested in the next book I’m writing: How to Be a Gig Economy Real Estate Agent. So, in Find Users Who, I choose tweet the phrase. And in the space to its right I type in global warming.

Now for the fun! Click on the green “Save and Run Campaign” box above. See what it produced:

Disregard the count in the red-circled area above. Even though it says 94 processed and 86 matched, it has loaded every tweet from here to almost eternity that mentions global warming in it.

I’ve cut off the right side of this screen for legibility purposes, but when you go online, at the far right of the top row of accounts (@UC_Real_Estate) you would see this:

Each time you click on Follow, the line below moves up to take its place and you click Follow. You can thusly follow hundreds of tweeters at the rate of about two clicks per second (but stay within your allowed ratio of approximately 10 percent of the number of followers you have so you don’t get a Twitter time-out). This is exactly what Manage Flitter used to do, but Refollow’s algorithms stagger your follows several seconds apart so the Twitter gods don’t come down on you. When I followed 105 accounts, the image below appeared a few seconds after I activated the search:

It says that it will take 10 minutes to follow the 99 people I had left in my queue. At this point I leave the screen alone! Don’t go somewhere else in Refollow because when I’ve gone elsewhere and tried to get back to that campaign, it doesn’t appear that it’s still “campaigning.” I don’t know for sure; best thing is just don’t touch it for as long as it says the Est. Time is.

Why Did I Indiscriminately Click on the First 100 Tweets?

If you were online and clicked to expand each of the above tweets, you would see the words global warming in those tweets. That’s what a campaign (a.k.a. wordsearch) does; it finds you people who tweet about your interest. So, what does all the gibberish in the four entries pictured above mean? (In case you want to go deep, which you don’t have to do to quickly grow your following, but it’s interesting.) Using the first tweet (@FrauFoo) to explain: the headings above it are Followers, Following, Influence, and Last Tweet.

@FrauFoo’s line indicates that

He has 1,812 followers

He’s following 1,262 people

“Influence” just converts Followers and Following to a ratio; this means that for every person he followed, 1.4 followed him back.

He last tweeted eight hours ago

Does that make him a good person to target? Well, 1,812 is a decent number of followers; they’re probably interested in global warming (since those words are in their tweets). So I’m going to follow him. Actually, I’m going to click, click, click all of the first 500 who pop up and don’t appear to be ax murderers or fomenting religious unrest, because for the purpose of just collecting followers you don’t need to be too targeted. However, when I use Refollow to market my book, I will take the time required to find people who are apt to be verrrry interested in what I write.

Unfollowing—The Other Half of the Equation As you know from reading my book about Twitter (What?! You haven’t?! Here’s the Amazon link: http://amzn.to/2nZ37gW), it’s important to keep your follower vs. followee ratio balanced (more followers than followees) because:

1. If it gets too out of whack, Twitter won’t let you follow anyone.
2. You don’t want to look like a troll.

So that we’re all literally on the same page, we’ll log out of Refollow. To do this, look at the upper right of the screen, where you’ll see this:

Then log back in, and choose to Authorize App, which lands you on this page:

Click on your campaign (circled in red above)—which will produce a page like this:

I just want you to see the general lay out of this page—I know you can’t read it. But in the upper right corner is the blue Unfollow People box. Click there. The next page will look like this:

Direct your attention to the right-hand side, which (expanded) looks like this:

See where it says “Following me?” above. Leave the check mark in that box and keep it at “No.”

Now, looking at the whole screen/page

Click the green box “Search People” (circled in red, above).

In my case, it produced this:

Again, you can’t read this here, but I want you to see the layout. When I click “Unfollow” (circled in red, above), the upper gray banner becomes a tallying register like this, below:

The red circled area at the right says that I’ve queued up 100 people to unfollow. The red circle to the left says it will take 9.54 seconds for that to be accomplished. It will begin the unfollowing process immediately, but the purpose is to let you know how long you need to keep your fingers off the keyboard and just let it do its thing.

There you have it, chickadees. And if Refollow causes you any grief, please feel free to email me: Cathy@CathyTurney.com.